Sunday's Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, sponsored by the Savannah Council Navy League and the Fleet Reserve Association, was held in the rotunda of the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum. (Photo by Carl Elmore/For the Savannah Morning News)

The rotunda of the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum in Pooler was packed Sunday during a remembrance ceremony for the Dec. 7, 1941 attack by Japan on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

The event was held Sunday instead of Dec. 7, organizers explained, in order to draw a larger crowd. The day’s featured speaker was U.S. Navy Cmdr. Todd Figanbaum, commanding officer of the USS Alaska, an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine stationed at Kings Bay.

Figanbaum told those in attendance of the USS Nevada, a ship that was severely damaged and whose crew sustained heavy casualties during the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Nevada was eventually salvaged and returned to duty, providing support during the invasions of Normandy in 1944 and Iwo Jima in 1945.

“... They truly were the greatest generation,” Figanbaum said later of those who fought in World War II. “They were thrust into a war they did not ask for. They went forward and won that war, and then they came back to our country and basically did the rebuilding process after war and helped with our industrialization and basically led us to the prosperity that we’re at today.”

The event also included a reading of “Voice from the Arizona,” a 21-gun salute, the presentation of a wreath and a two-bell ceremony to honor those who lost their lives.

Dozens of people attended the event, but the few World War II veterans in reserved seats at the front who were recognized with applause were perhaps the most noticed.

One of them, 94-year-old Thomas R. Freeman of Savannah, remembers exactly where he was when he heard Pearl Harbor had been attacked.

“It was Sunday. I was in medical school, and I was in charge of the freshman dormitory at Emory University, and this was mid- or late morning,” he said. “... We didn’t know what was going on. We did not. We had nothing to relate that to, and so we did not realize at the time the severity of the damage that was done at Pearl Harbor or the damage it was leading to in this country and to the world.”

Freeman enlisted in the Navy, but he was able to finish medical school before heading to war, eventually serving as a physician aboard a ship in the Pacific theater.

“I was there two and a half years, and I never heard any comment to the effect that we ought not to be there,” he said. “I mean, that was the duty of everybody and they felt it.”